The Exhibition

“An art exhibition gathering international artists in a joined-up and multi-faceted reflection on the collective memory, starting from the bodies and forms in which it incarnates. The perspective focuses on the memory of the world conflicts (from the Great War, researching its legacies in the following conflicts of the Twentieth Century), still not plumed at all. The exhibition is made of three principal thematic blocks: the memory of conflict as symbolised in the natural elements, the memory laced in the materical objects of the conflict (through a significant revision of these objects, taking the distances from the idolatry for the war object, getting closer to the ready made), the memory that gradually is shrinking, becoming light into its materic bodies, until becoming an incision and then a writing.”

Tomb Sculpture - The Artwork

The work selected for this show is Tomb Sculpture, a serie of 4 sculptures that present themselves as roundish yellow objects covered in spikes. The spikes are casts of human teeth, revealing the root instead of the crown.

Although the title would normally suggest the end of a life, in this case it represents the end of a gesture, the action of filling up, and it is presented as ‘the remains of an action’.

“An ossuary, a place where bones are kept in order to conserve the remnants of a human body, it often consists in a cell or a small church, where once the skeletons are gathered they lose any ref- erence to a single person. After great catastrophes the number of bones was often so large that they were hanged on any surface available, resulting in spectacular decorations of sacred interiors with a mixture of ironic and macabre connotations. Cosima Montavoci’s Tomb Sculpture, share the same attitude by covering the crust of undefined rounded sculptures with casts of her own teeth. The constant memento mori, which accompanies our daily life through the aging and decay of our body, it is here re- versed by using human spoilages to fill a temporal gap by means of repeating a gesture.”

“The sculptures of the Tomb Sculpture series, realised by Cosima Montavoci, are born from the desire to evoke the ancient custom of the ossuaries, places where the exhumed remains of deceased people were piled - places that are, in some ways, symbol of individuals' depersonalization after death.

Taking from history and ancient traditions the idea that bones can be used as ornaments of atavistic power, the artist puts them in her work in a both serious and ironic way and introduces a pulsing question on the symbols of our spirituality, among which bones stand out firmly: fearful harbingers of the constant decadence of our body, yet immortal witnesses of the past.

The work reveals more and more, as the viewer approaches to it: the surface is covered by casts of the artist's teeth.”

Villa Manin - The Venue

Villa Manin beside being a stunning Villa with a spectacular garden, is actually pretty charged in history. The Manin family started the very ambitious project in the 17th century, taking as a model Versailles - they employed the architect that planned the gardens in the Parisian masterpiece -, and was continuously developed and improved until mid 18th century.

In 1789 Lodovico IV Manin became the Venetian doge for a short time, as the Venetian Republic was already in decline and would have been taken over by Napoleone Bonaparte shortly after. Napoleone also lived in Villa Manin during the negotiations with the Austrians.

The central and strategic position was often the center of the battles between the German, Slavic and Mediterranean worlds, culminating in the Battle of Codroipo (1917), that saw 300,000 Italian soldiers defending the territory from four different German divisions. Also Franz Kafka wrote about this battle.

During the Second World War, Villa Manin was used to store and protect artworks of the surrounding areas, where many battles between Partisans and the Nazi forces took place.

From 1961 Villa Manin has seen new life, thanks to the School of Restoration, and hosting many art events and concerts in its premesis.